Mega Man 1: A Newcomer's Analysis - Pikasprey

[Music] hello internet users and welcome back to another video today we're going to be talking about the mega man series the mega man games are something that i've always been aware of but i was never really able to play them when i was growing up i think we can all agree that no matter how much we enjoy games it's always going to be impossible to keep up with everything that releases especially when we're young and just can't afford it all but now that we've got all these collections i recently decided that it was time to go back and give them all a try i know that some fans have issues with the legacy collections and say what you will about them but these things have made the games a lot more accessible to people like me and now that i'm finally playing them one of the things i wanted to do was start covering all the mega man games with videos with how much they have to offer just playing through one and moving on isn't enough for me i want to take my time going through each one talking about everything i liked and disliked but with that being said there are a lot of mega man releases the original series by itself already has quite a lot of numbered sequels i mean how often does a game get to put the number 11 on the cover then you have the mega man x series which goes up to x8 the mega man legends series with a few more games mega man battle network with six games mega man zero with four mega man star force with three more then there's even mega man zx with another two and it doesn't even stop there either there's a ton of other spin-off games like mega man x command mission mega man network transmission mega man and bass mega man battleship challenge arcade games cart racing game fmv game even a soccer game and many many more there's just so much to get through that it's pretty intimidating for someone to try and jump in now but that's exactly what i'm going to be attempting and what better place is there to start a mega marathon than with the very first game it's pretty well known that mega man started out on the nes the original games were pretty popular with capcom putting out a new one every year by the end of the nes life they had gotten up to mega man 6. that's right mega man got its first five sequels developed for the same console something that's almost unheard of nowadays it certainly wasn't uncommon for the nes to have some trilogies but normally most franchises would go through the lifespan of several consoles before getting to their sixth numbered entry the idea of the games worked like this at the start you're presented with a list of robot masters to choose from when you select one you have to play through their stage and then face them at the end as a boss when a robot master is beaten mega man will gain their ability and can use it in the other stages being able to play the stages in any order like this is something that made mega man pretty unique for the time the more powers you gained the more options you had for dealing with enemies and obstacles as well every boss in the games would be given a weakness to a specific robot power so if you were having trouble with one boss you could head back to the stage select and see if your current abilities were better used elsewhere it's a pretty cool concept that gives the experience a lot of replayability i think i'm already looking forward to seeing how these ideas are first introduced and then manage the change after so many sequels before i get into the game itself though something that needs to be talked about is some of the history surrounding mega man 1's localization being the first game in the series and the first to be brought overseas some odd decisions would be made before presenting it to a new audience in japan mega man is known as rockman apparently the higher ups at capcom usa didn't like the name and it was decided to change it to mega man when the series made its way to europe they also went with the mega man title the name change would stick for all future releases of rock man games outside of japan the next thing i need to mention is the legendary box art released in north america if there's one thing you've ever heard about mega man it's probably this thing comparing it with the original i'm guessing this was just a misguided attempt to make mega man look cool or something this was the late 80s after all obviously though it didn't work out as they planned the bad box art mega man has gone on to become a long-running joke with fans capcom themselves would even frequently reference this version of the character in some of their other games and with the later releases of mega man 9 and 10 they'd go as far as to make special covers making fun of the original box art and how it had nothing to do with the game it was made for but anyways the next thing i need to address is the changes to the story while there isn't any plot mentioned in the game itself there was some provided in the instruction manuals in the original the story is that it's the year 2000 x where robots are regularly used for industrial purposes thanks to the breakthroughs of dr thomas light however one day the evil dr wily reprogrammed six of dr light's robots in order to use them to take over the world rock and roll were two of dr light's other robots designed to perform household chores to stop dr wily dr light transformed rock into mega man and sent him to stand up against the six corrupted robot masters the us manual has a bit of a different take on this plot wiley was light's assistant mega man is now on a quest to save the universe from monsteropolis it's all kind of random at this point fans just kind of ignore this stuff though and accept the japanese version as the actual story but when it comes to the game itself the only difference between the two is the title screens no gameplay changes were made at all and speaking of the title screens we're gonna actually get started with this after hitting start mega man 1 takes you directly to the stage select where we can choose the first boss to fight the robot masters of this game are cut man guts man iceman bomb man fireman and elec man now being an nes game there aren't very many buttons so it's pretty easy to pick up a controller and understand the gameplay right away mega man is a 2d side scroller you use left and right to move a to jump and b to fire the mega buster the goal is to jump and shoot your way through each stage while avoiding the enemies along the way to defeat the boss at the end an important thing to note is that if mega man falls into a pit or touches any spikes you'll lose a life instantly every enemy has a chance of dropping something when defeated the most common drop is these little orbs collecting these will give you more points at the end of a stage the really useful drops though are the health and energy items they can appear in both small and large sizes health items are pretty self-explanatory but the energy is used for replenishing power to your current weapon as you progress through the game you'll collect a full list of weapons by pressing start you can open a menu that lets you swap between them each one requires energy to use and these pickups are the only thing that can restore some of it during the stage of course though since you're just starting you only have the regular mega buster which requires no energy at all going into this game i did have an idea of which robot master to start with i remembered hearing years ago that cut man fireman and bomb man were ideal choices the first stage i went into was bomb man's and once i'm making my way through it it's pretty easy to see why it's considered a good first level most of it is just learning where to stand so you can move through the gaps in enemy attacks because of that it makes very little difference what powers you enter with since the stage is more about avoiding the enemies instead of fighting them when you do need to get rid of something though your basic buster attack is usually the best option anyway when you reach bomb man himself he has in my opinion one of the easiest patterns to deal with you might think that you're supposed to keep your distance and then move under these bomb tosses but it's actually a lot simpler than that whenever you're close to him he'll jump away so as long as you're always moving towards him you can easily land shots while he hops around he'll barely even get the chance to attack you with the first robot master defeated you can finally start using more than just the mega buster for attacks bomb man's ability is the hyper bomb with it you can toss out a bomb and from here i can finally start talking about the weakness order of the game in mega man every boss will take damage from your normal attack but there's always one ability that they'll take massive damage from guts man is the one who's weak to the hyper bomb defeating him unlocks the super arm which lets you pick up and throw blocks throwing blocks with the super arm is the weakness of cut man and defeating cut man gets you the rolling cutter which is really effective against elec man elec man's power is the thunder beam which will destroy iceman in just a few seconds beating iceman gets you the ice lasher which deals good damage to fireman and finally getting past fireman unlocks the firestorm which is the weakness of bomb man it should be noted that the effectiveness of all of these abilities isn't actually told to the player in game of course nowadays you can always just look up this stuff on the internet if you really want to but i think the intention here is to reward you for experimenting some bosses could be a bit difficult if you didn't have the right weapon but they weren't by any means impossible destroying a boss with their weakness was more of a bonus than an absolute necessity so now that i've explained that the next thing i want to highlight is how all of these abilities can affect how you handle the regular enemies in this game mega man's mechanics go far beyond the walls of the boss rooms and i found that i surprisingly have a lot to say take this enemy here for example it appears in multiple areas and you can't destroy it with the mega buster only freeze it in place for a few seconds making it easier to jump around however most of the other weapons in the game will get rid of it completely in guts man stage there is one portion where these mining robots will attack you they normally take several shots from the buster but if you use the hyper bomb they'll go down in one hit this makes the most sense since this is also guts man's weakness but these enemies are also weak to the firestorm so even if you haven't beaten bomb man yet if you've got fireman's power you still technically have an advantage when you're going through here another enemy you'll see frequently is this hopping robot technically it takes the most damage from the super arm blocks and the hyper bomb but it has so much hp that you might as well just try to avoid it altogether its jumping is random but if you happen to have the ice slasher you can freeze it in the air and move under it pretty safely in addition to that in fireman's area you can briefly freeze the pillars of fire and use them as platforms cut man's entire stage is filled with blocks so if you cleared guts man already you have some more options for moving through it having gone through the game several times while making this video it felt like i was learning something new about the enemies every playthrough however i do have to point out one major mistake they made with one enemy this robot right here is known as a sniper joe you might recognize it as it would go on to become a pretty iconic enemy in the franchise appearing frequently in later games but in the case of mega man 1 sniper joes only show up in one tiny section at the end of bomb man stage and their weakness is the hyper bomb i think you can see what the problem is by the time you have joe's weakness you'll never see them again for the rest of the game it is possible to replay the stages but there's no reason to ever go back to this area normally you have to play patiently with this enemy since it'll try to chase you if you jump past it so you're stuck waiting until its shield is down to attack the hyper bomb destroys them in one hit but it's completely worthless with how the game is set up maybe it's possible that devs intended to use joe's in other stages but the end result is what we got here i think it's a pretty big shame too since the hyper bomb isn't exactly the most useful ability aside from using it against guts man i find myself never using it again it's just too slow it can only hit things on the ground with all that being said though i don't think there is any question that elec man's ability is the best in the game in fact i'd almost say that it's too good the thunder beam fires a blast above below and in front of you as well since it can go through walls and floors this makes it easy to clear out enemies with and as if that wasn't enough it can even destroy the super arm blocks too as much as i love how the game encourages you to use all of the weapons once you get this one you'll end up using it the majority of the time the biggest exception to this is the bosses hitting them with their weakness is always going to be the strongest option and while we're on the subject i want to talk a little bit about the game's damage values going into mega man i kind of assumed that every weapon did the same damage and it was only the weakness that did a little bit more however that couldn't be further from the truth focusing on just the robot masters the numbers i've put on screen show how much damage each one takes from just the mega buster as you can see a cut man takes the most damage while iceman and elec man take the least now if we look at how much damage they take from their weaknesses you can see that the numbers increase by quite a bit from this you can probably see why certain robot masters are recommended for plane first cut man is clearly designed to be the easiest boss fight and in the case of fireman and bomb men the additional damage from their weaknesses doesn't make as much of a difference as the others as well when trying out other weapons against the robot masters you'll find that the damage values vary greatly for example despite the thunder beam being one of the best attacks in the game for most of the bosses it'll only deal a tiny bit of damage for many of them it'll do even less than the mega buster the next thing i want to mention is how this game handles checkpoints and game overs i think mega man is pretty forgiving when it comes to this stuff whenever i died as long as i had remaining lives it never felt like the game put me too far back from where i was and even if you do get a game over the only punishment is that you have to start the stage over from the beginning you don't have to worry about replaying any of the stages you already cleared you should be aware though that there are no saves or even a password system you pretty much expected to beat the whole thing in one sitting however if you're playing on something like the legacy collection you can just use the built-in save state features to take a break and turn it off whenever you want i probably should say here that i have beaten the game without doing that because that matters to some people something else that happens when you get a game over is that your score will be reset to zero this really doesn't matter though points are easily the most unnecessary mechanic in the entire game even if you manage to stay alive from start to finish it's impossible for any high scores to be competitive when you select a robot master the amount of points you'll earn by defeating them is determined randomly not only that but there isn't any kind of time limit when you're playing if you really want to earn points there's nothing stopping you from just infinitely farming the enemies fortunately starting with mega man 2 they abandoned this idea altogether considering the time that the first game was released it wouldn't surprise me if the score system was some kind of executive mandate it feels like it's only here just because lots of other games had it so moving along it's now time to talk about the final part of the game when all six robot masters are defeated you'll gain access to the layer of dr wily which is broken up into four additional stages that this time you have to play in a set order the first level begins outdoors and has you literally break down the walls to enter wiley's fortress once you're here though get ready to deal with a set of completely broken rooms as soon as you climb up this ladder there is a chance that these enemies will already be jumping towards you when this happens you're almost guaranteed to get hit this is probably the only instance in the game where i'd say the enemy placement is kinda cheap because you're climbing a ladder you'll naturally still be holding up as the screen changes unless you know in advance that there could be enemies leaping at you you're left pretty defenseless the room after this is also broken but this time it's actually to the benefit of the player as you can see you need to move to the bottom and reach this ladder it's a short room but it's easy to accidentally get knocked into the spikes amazingly though if you just jump towards the top left corner you can do a screen wrap and end up where the ladder is skipping the room entirely this trek actually works in a few other places like cut man stage for example it's kind of hilarious how they miss this considering how easy it is to do anyways after heading down this ladder you have to deal with this awful room these robots are called the foot holders like the name implies you're supposed to jump on them and use them as platforms however for some unknown reason the devs decided to make their movements completely random because of this you might have to wait a ridiculous amount of time just to jump on the first one i'm not exaggerating when i say this i recorded an instance where it took four minutes for it to fly low enough and when it did this happened [Music] as it turns out these enemies are pretty infamous for their hitboxes sometimes it can extend upwards into the parts that you're supposed to stand on i think you can all see why that's a problem oh but don't worry this level gets even worse when you reach the next room so you see i forgot to mention one little detail about wiley one from the moment i entered this stage it was actually impossible for me to make it past this room this is because i'm lacking a certain something that i never got in another level so now i have no choice but to jump into the spikes until i'm all out of lives just so i can go back to get it aside from the robot master weapons mega man actually has one more ability in this game in elec man stage there's an item along the way sealed behind some blocks this item lets you use the magnet beam it's an incredibly helpful item that can make some parts a lot less difficult as you may have guessed using this beam is the only way you can climb through the room in wiley one and that fact right there is a huge problem odds are the first time you see this item you won't have a way to get it and because it's placed about halfway through the stage most people just forget about it and move on because it's stuck behind blocks it's pretty natural to just assume that the item was optional anyway sure it does kind of stick out when you see it but how in the world are you just supposed to know that the final stages are unbeatable without it the fact that the game even lets you attempt the wily stage without this is a horrible design choice the room you need the beam for is located at the very end right before the boss if you didn't find it before entering playing through the stage was just a massive waste of time you are able to re-enter the stages you already beat however aside from getting the beam in elec man stage you'll never use this feature if they wanted to make the beam a necessity then they should have just made it a forced pickup like every other ability there's no reason why this situation should even be possible it's just an unfair punishment to the player for not knowing something in advance apparently the japanese instruction manual does mention that the beam's required to beat the game but for whatever reason this fact was left out of the north american manual either way the way it's implemented is pretty bad if you ask me if they had to warn the player about this in the original manual then they clearly knew that many people would miss the item if that's the case then they should have just made a change to the game itself on a more positive note the beam does fix the problem with the foot holders don't even bother trying to jump on these things just skip over them with this i should mention that they only appear in two locations near the end of iceman's stage and in the spike room in wiley one these enemies are so broken that the beam might as well be a requirement for beating iceman too it certainly makes that part a lot less infuriating if you ask me anyways now that i've got all that explained we can finally move on to the boss beyond this room this is the yellow devil it's one of the most iconic bosses in the series and is often referred to as being the hardest fight in the whole game it'll go from each side of the screen breaking its body apart to attack you when it's back together you have a brief moment to shoot its eye which is weak to the thunder beam you have to wait for all 19 parts of its body to move and have to dodge them every single time even when you start to feel confident about dodging all it takes is one hit to throw you off and then you take even more damage luckily the pattern is always exactly the same so despite how overwhelming it looks you can get the hang of it with a little practice from what i hear this is the part where a lot of people can just give up it's such a huge spike in difficulty and it's at the end of a very annoying stage i can imagine this would feel even more frustrating if you were one of the people that had to go back for the magnet beam as well going into wiley 2 from here the rest of the game is one big boss rush there are still some platforming sections but they're pretty short from what i've been seeing it seems to be a tradition in most of the mega man games to make you re-fight all of the major bosses at the end in some entries you're given a little bit of freedom and can choose which order to play them but here in mega man 1 the six robot masters will appear along the way and in a set order in cut man's room there aren't any super arm blocks so he can't be hit with his weakness but he already takes enough damage from the buster so he's still pretty easy after that you'll always want to use the weaknesses having access to all the abilities the game pretty much expects you to be using them as a side note i found that managing weapon energy in this game didn't matter very much even when i made no effort to get extra drops i almost never ran out of something the only instance where it's kind of a problem is at the final boss but there the game always gives you a single refill item before you enter the last door so that pretty much solves that if you fire attacks carelessly then you probably will run out but i think the game is pretty generous with how much you can use from a full meter at the end of wiley 2 you fall into a room where a machine creates a clone of mega man this boss gave me a lot of trouble when i first got to it its movements are weird and sort of tied to your inputs because of that you can technically manipulate it a bit and put it in a position where it can barely fight back keep in mind that it doesn't actually have a weakness the buster does a little bit of damage and some of the weapons do a little bit more personally i found that using the firestorm was the safest option as you can see it copies whatever weapon you have equipped and it's definitely easier to dodge this than the thunderbeam by the way if you pause and equip either the super arm or the beam it won't be able to attack you it'll just run back and forth going into wiley 3 you have a very short stage that quickly takes you to the boss mega man falls into a sewer system and the current pushes them through a long tunnel the boss here is a wave of robots that get faster with each one that comes out throwing the blocks in the room will instantly destroy one however there obviously aren't enough blocks for all of them so i'd recommend just using the buster in the first view this boss can seem a bit annoying at first but quickly becomes one of the easy ones when you know what to do and with that we've come to the final area of the game before you can face wiley you have to re-fight the remaining 4 robot masters all in a row with no health given between each one on a first playthrough this will no doubt be an infuriating part to overcome even if you know the patterns and weakness of each one it's not easy to make it through without taking lots of hits i talked a bit about bomb man's fight earlier just stay close to him and it'll always try to jump for fireman there's a strategy you can do by standing just the right distance away from him by pressing jump and attack at the same time like this you can safely take him out without getting hurt yourself this is even easier to do in his normal boss fight you don't even have to move from your starting position just wait for him to approach you it's kind of hilarious how easy this is to do i considered fireman one of the harder robot masters when i first started too fun fact you can do something similar with a lek man but the time in there is a little harder to pull off iceman takes massive damage from the thunderbeam you can easily defeat him before his first wave of attacks even reaches you the final re-fight is against guts man he's probably the only part that still gives me trouble his jumps are random and the hyper bomb is a slow weapon not to mention the arena is a bit smaller this time once you're past this you get a checkpoint before entering the final boss as long as you still have lives you won't have to refight the robot masters again if you die wylie's boss fight is split up into two phases during the first phase the only thing that does extra damage is the firestorm the boss's invincibility frames don't last long between hits so if you get close you can hit him for massive damage and end this part pretty quickly during the final part all weapons inflict the same amount of damage however using the thunder beam is still the best option because the beam has a long hitbox it hits him multiple times and his iframes are still short both phases have attacks where it tracks where you're standing but it's not hard to figure out how to use it to your advantage with that dr wily is defeated and mega man has restored peace to the world after the credits play out we get a shot of mega man without his armor returning home to role in dr light as far as the story goes this is where things end for mega man 1 but there's still one major thing i need to talk about here the pause glitch by pressing start you can pause the game by opening up the weapon menu however you can also use select to use a more traditional pause option the problem here is that when you pause this way there's actually one thing that the game doesn't stop and that thing is the timer on enemy invincibility frames what does this mean exactly well imagine you're fighting a boss like the yellow devil when you land a hit against it its iframes are long enough that it's normally impossible to attack it more than once per cycle but if you were to hit it with something like the thunder beam with the right timing you can pause and unpause so that it'll take multiple hits from that single attack as i'm sure you can imagine using this trick can make almost every boss ridiculously easy when i first went into the game i was aware of the glitch however i avoided even testing it out until after i beat it it's kind of fun to mess around with at first but the novelty wears off quick it just lets you skip past almost any boss with little effort there are other glitches in this game but i'm not the right person to sit here and explain all of them i did want to show off some of the more amusing ones though and with that i've just about covered everything that i wanted to talk about for mega man 1. overall i would say that i found myself enjoying it a lot more than i expected to being a newcomer to the franchise i've heard all sorts of vague opinions on which games are considered good and which ones are considered bad when it comes to the classic series on the nes i often hear that mega man 1 has the worst reputation in fact i've even seen some people go as far as to recommend skipping it all together apparently it's notorious for its difficulty which is something i can kind of understand all the boss fights at the end of the game can seem pretty unforgiving when you get to them especially when you discover that you have to go through several in a row just to get another chance or two at the final boss while the wily stages are undeniably a huge spike in difficulty i wouldn't say that they're completely unfair or anything like that the game is also pretty short even if you get stuck for a while in a few parts it can still be finished in a single sitting the core concept of mega man was to make a game where the bosses can be played in any order and i think this is something that they did a really good job with after going through it several times it was fun to discover all the different ways you can deal with enemies and hazards while many people would say that mega man 1 is a rough first game despite its noticeable flaws i think it lays the foundation for the sequel to expand on while also being pretty good on its own and let's be real here the next game mega man 2 is one of the most iconic video game sequels of all time not only that but it's also to this day the best-selling mega man game of all time it's not hard to see why the original game can be written off when it has to live in a shadow like that but anyways that about covers everything i wanted to talk about the original idea for this video was to cover all six of the nes games but i ended up having so much to say that i ended up just making a long video about one of them and with so many more sequels and spin-offs to explore i'm sure i'll have even more to say about the series in the future too my name is picasprey and thanks for watching hey everyone thanks for watching the video i had a lot of delays working on this one you can follow my social medias and twitch if you'd like to thanks again and here's hoping that the next thing i work on goes well too but anyways thanks again and i'll see you all next time bye you

Channel: Pikasprey Yellow

Views: 96,405

Rating: 4.9754672 out of 5

Keywords: Gaming, Video Game

Id: NVaQwUOmWjY

Length: 26min 40sec (1600 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 03 2021